The The NSW Writers' Centre

This is a novel that gives a real sense of the helplessness engendered by distance and isolation in colonial Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Letters, often brief and late to arrive, bring to remote families inadequate and politely censored accounts of illness, death and bereavement. Little wonder that a villain such as Rev William Hammond (if villain ...

Full of snappy, bite-sized ideas and explorations, this book both holds your attention and allows the reader to dip in and out, guilt-free. Alternating between the gentle and the arresting, these poems span the emotions of the author. Roaming through his lifetime, loves, friends and neighbourhoods, they scratch the surface of significant life events and mull over beautiful but otherwise ...

Do you like food? Do you like writing? Ever thought about food writing? John Newton, a World Food Media Award winning writer and food journalist, talks to us about a job with some serious perks.   Why food writing? Because food is essential to life, and becoming a more and more complex subject politically, socially and environmentally. Also because gastronomy - the study ...

I'm being really festival greedy this year... You'll find me running (if you care to look, and you should - my run is good for a laugh) between events trying to cram as much festival goodness in as I can before the week ends. However, the absolute standout - the event that I am most excited to see this year ...

‘Travelling is a constant process of trying to get away.’ And what travellers often discover in the end is that it is their very selves they are trying to escape. Felicity Castagna captures this concept beautifully in the characters moving through this collection (and yes, these stories are character driven despite the impression the subtitle might give: the settings are ...

Finding Sean is a fast paced thriller with plenty of twists and turns.  Set around the NSW and Victorian boarder, Finding Sean relates the story of Lane Kintyre, small town Private Investigator, and her search for missing brother Sean and his girlfriend Tobi. Lane reports the two as missing persons after Sean fails to make contact but, as Lane employs ...

It’s 1933 Australia, during the Great Depression and Roland Sinclair gentleman, portrait artist and amateur sleuth sets out for the Snowy Mountains’ High Country to investigate the mysterious disappearance of “native stockman” Harry Simpson. Steeped in historical detail and bush mythology this beguiling novel is filled with recognisable characters both real and imagined. Crime fiction in the style popularised by Agatha ...

I’ll be leaving the main hub of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, those creaky wharves, on Friday night to head out to the Bankstown Arts Centre to see the latest production from the Westside Writers’ Group – one of the most dynamic and talented group of writers in the country. Westside meet fortnightly to workshop their own writing, but they do ...

  It’s been six years since Jaya Savige published Latecomers, his debut collection of poetry, a collection both award-winning and highly regarded. Surface to Air is a highly anticipated release, and there’s been a great deal of interest in Savige’s new work. This is a startling and often surprising collection, exploring new territories – geographical, emotional and formal – as well ...

My personal pick for the Festival is Chad Harbach’s session. I first heard about his novel ‘The Art of Fielding’ when I read Keith Gessen’s article in Vanity Fair about how the book came into being. The novel took ten years to write and seemed, at times, like a lost cause. The article itself is worth reading for an introduction ...